-
For what it's worth, the way I divide these things up in my little brain is that terrorists are people who imagine that as individuals they can wage war against states.
Yes this is something I've been thinking about comparing the state's response to London/Westminster bridges (immediate Cobra meeting etc) compared to the poor response to grenfell from authority.
In the bridge attacks the establishment was attacked directly because the perps represented an ideology that is anti-our establishment. The victims of the Grenfell tower who would have really benefitted from a strong and coordinated response, an immediate look at the death tally etc were so not establishment that it really took a while for the state to move
skydancer-
The 'quick' response from police/fire services both bridges and Grenfell ( 8 - 6 minutes ?) appears to be the first and feeble positive comment from government/establishment every time - like thats all we've got.
-
Yes this is something I've been thinking about comparing the state's response to London/Westminster bridges (immediate Cobra meeting etc) compared to the poor response to grenfell from authority.
In the bridge attacks the establishment was attacked directly because the perps represented an ideology that is anti-our establishment. The victims of the Grenfell tower who would have really benefitted from a strong and coordinated response, an immediate look at the death tally etc were so not establishment that it really took a while for the state to move
I don't think that comparison works. As one former police officer said after the London Bridge incident, in London or Manchester you can still have that kind of police response, but elsewhere police cover for that sort of thing is 'threadbare', caused by police cuts.
Council cuts have devastated local authorities, or, perhaps, given a wealthier authority like K&C an excuse to scale services back--I'm sure they haven't suffered financially as badly as somewhere like Hackney, but perhaps they've taken other measures that have weakened their services. (In Hackney, I watched the Council rebuild itself after the financial crisis of 1999/2000 over a period of more than ten years before that 'austerity' arseholery destroyed so much again.)
While K&C seems to have had very poor management on this, I can't really imagine other authorities to have coped much better with the need to immediately rehouse hundreds of people while they undoubtedly already have extremely long and non-moving waiting lists.
not4sale
Oliver Schick
For what it's worth, the way I divide these things up in my little brain is that terrorists are people who imagine that as individuals they can wage war against states. They love being considered terrorists because it validates their hubris to be able to have their acts thought of as acts of warfare. The reason why so many are willing to risk/actively seek death is because they consider themselves soldiers in (non-existent) armies.
Roughly the same pattern even applies to guerilla forces spread out over large areas, although obviously their lack of statehood doesn't preclude them from assembling large numbers of people, and they might even eventually succeed in establishing states. There's still a distinction between them and opposing forces in a civil war.
Obviously, lone wolves can consider themselves connected to Internet propaganda or any old guff put out by some group, but I think a hate crime is different from terrorism in that the perpetrator doesn't consider themselves acting particularly against a state, but against other individuals or a group of individuals, so someone shouting 'I want to kill Muslims' wouldn't be a terrorist under that heading.
At the same time, to me none of these distinctions matter. I consider them all common murderers.
RIP unknown victim (and here's hoping that nobody else dies as a result of this).